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On the Conversion of Word Class from Adjectives to Nouns in English Based on British National Corpus 1980s-1993

Author: LiWanHui
Tutor: SiXianZhu
School: Beijing Jiaotong University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: British National Corpus Converted Words Conversion from Adjective to Noun
CLC: H313
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 48
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Abstract

It is commonly agreed that certain word class will be converted into another word class during the process of social development. With the development of language, these conversion of word class have become common phenomena in English, which are calling for researching attention from linguists. Nowadays, linguists are interested in words which have been converted from one word class to another and the fields in which conversion most commonly happen as well as the influences on language using caused by the conversion etc. Of all the linguists who are working in this field, Si Xianzhu’s study dwells on the description of conversion of word classes, which is a new and very demanding angle for the study of conversion of word classes. Based on Si’study, this thesis will only focus on the description of the conversion from adjectives to nouns in English. By doing so, this thesis should be one of the supporting materials for the study of word class conversion, and what is more important is that it is a new angle for studying conversion of word class.Generally there are mainly three objectives in this thesis. The first one is data collection. Since this research is based on the Longman Dictionary and BNC, the prerequisite for doing so is to find out all the words that are experiencing the process of conversion from adjectives to nouns. In order to fulfill this goal, first of all, all the words which are tagged as and only as adjective or both as adjective and verb in the Longman Dictionary will be selected, then input these words separately into BNC to check whether there are examples in which the target words are used as nouns, if there are such examples, examples will be collected completely. By doing so, all the converted words from adjectives to nouns will be collected, which can illustrate how many adjective words at present in The Longman Dictionary are experiencing conversion to nouns, what are the genres in which conversion happen, and what are the specific sources in which converted word examples come from and so on. In a word, data collection will objectively illustrate all the nouns converted from adjectives and make up for the description-inadequacy of the previous study.The second objective is data description. This thesis will try to give a relatively comprehensive description for the data from the perspectives of qualitative and quantitative, distribution, frequency and source information. By doing so, the converted words will be illustrated objectively to readers.The third objective is data explanation. Based on the collected data and the description about the data from many angles, next, the thesis will try to explain why some of the adjectives are experiencing the process of conversion. The explanation will mainly be undergone from the perspective of Functional Linguistics.

On the Conversion of Word Class from Adjectives to Nouns in English Based on British National Corpus 1980s-1993

Abstract

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